How do you shoot a black hole?

I found a very small black hairy frogfish recently but, despite working on it for a while, struggled to get a decent image. How the heck do you shoot something that absorbs all light while it is sitting on a bright reflective sandy bottom?!

As shown, I eventually settled on using one strobe high and to the left to try to get a little relief from the lighting, but it was only partly successful. Standard macro front lighting produced an unrecognizable blob as it just washed out all the texture. I wanted to also try backlighting, but was in less than 2 m of water, fighting the surge with nothing to brace against, and just couldn't get a good stable position.

Shoot from a lower angle...eliminate as much of the light-colored background as possible. Zoom in, eliminate as much of the light-colored background as possible. Use just enough light to keep the light-colored background from blowing out; the fish will be underexposed, but it is easier to bring up the underexposure in post-processing than to tone down a blown-out background.Light low and from the side, not the top, so you see both texture and can "skim" the light over the sand. Pray.

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Posted 18 February 2018 - 08:51 AM

Shoot from a lower angle...eliminate as much of the light-colored background as possible. Zoom in, eliminate as much of the light-colored background as possible. Use just enough light to keep the light-colored background from blowing out; the fish will be underexposed, but it is easier to bring up the underexposure in post-processing than to tone down a blown-out background.Light low and from the side, not the top, so you see both texture and can "skim" the light over the sand. Pray.

LOL, I reckon that gives you a black blob on a nicely exposed background

No, that's not quite what I said. I suggested to overexpose the background, right to the point before it is blown out, because then you still have a chance to tone it down in post and bring up the blacks. If the blacks are pure black (i.e., properly exposed background) or the whites are pure white (i.e., properly exposed fish), no chance to adjust the bad part in post. Split the difference, don't choose one or the other. You need to turn off ALL automatic exposure modes!

If you shoot in raw, process the image twice once for the fish and once for the sand. Then combine them with layer masks, depending on how contrasty it is you may need to process some intermediate exposures to make the recombination process work better.

If I was shooting it I'd be tempted to try HDR. I'm using the EM-1 MkII and with its high frame rate it blasts off the frames needed for a HDR image extremely quickly making the possibility of doing HDR UW feasible.